


The Court Seer

by stammed_cleams



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast), The Adventure Zone Amnesty
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Gen, Headcanon, Indrid Cold's childhood, Mentions of Sex, Post-Canon, Running Away, Silvane, canon study, from indrid's perspective, how Indrid got to Earth, surrogate parenting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21838543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stammed_cleams/pseuds/stammed_cleams
Summary: During a game of truth or dare, Duck asks Indrid why, when the portal was reopened, he didn't return to Silvaine and resume his position as court Seer. To answer, Indrid goes back to his early childhood, explaining all that Silvaine took from him, and the state it was in while the Quell was at its strongest.
Kudos: 3





	The Court Seer

**Author's Note:**

> hey gang!! so the inspiration for this fic is that i, like i believe many, found it a very interesting dm choice to make indrid give leo the job as court seer instead of taking it up himself, and it got me wondering, what kind of past would he have to have to want to do that? let me know what you think of indrid's backstory, and tell me how it differs from your own theories in the comments!!

“Alright, my turn,” Aubrey said. She was on the floor, in front of the sofa, with Dani playing with her hair above her, a glass of something shimmering brown in both their hands. Around them were various visitors from Earth and Silvane, including Mama, Barclay, Stern, Duck, Minerva, Kirby and Billy. Thacker, as usual, wasn’t able to make it to the group hangout, but he would find a way to sneak in when it was over and speak with Mama alone. Like a bunch of children, they had resolved to play truth or drink in the middle of Mama’s living room. On the couch opposite Aubrey’s, Duck was sitting with Minerva’s arm around his shoulders. Aubrey used her drink to gesture to the white cast around his right arm. “How’d you break your arm?” she asked. As Minerva leaned forward and opened her mouth to speak Aubrey raised a hand, “And I know Minerva’s been telling everyone who’ll listen that you were injured in battle, but I want to hear it from Duck! How’d you break your arm?”  
Minerva, at being passed over, shot a look of panic at Duck, who was looking down and biting his cheek in thought. An embarrassed smile riddled with memories began to creep onto his face. He glanced at Minerva for a moment, as if for permission, before opening his mouth to speak. “Well, you see, um… it’s actually kind of a funny story…mm…” he paused, trying again, “See, sometimes Minerva does this thing with me, where she’ll…” he made a vague gesture in the air, before letting his hands fall back down again, “Would you believe I didn’t notice at the time?”  
At that, Minerva buried her face in her hands and shook her head, and eyes around the group went wide. 

“Duck, oh my God…” Dani commented. 

Barclay, looking seriously alarmed, spoke up, “You said that it was fully shattered,” he reminded him. Duck shrugged, and Barclay looked even more horrified. His voice lowered, “From  _ sex?!”  _   


“A clean break I can almost understand, but something the weight of an anvil would have had to slam into you to fully shatter it,” Agent Stern spoke up from his place just beside Barclay. 

“How do you even manage that?!” Aubrey demanded.

“What, you want to know the specifics?” Duck responded. 

“I mean - I’ll admit I’m curious.”

Minerva spoke up, still shaking her head, “Aubrey Little, I… must take the blame for this mishap. I will take the dishonor upon myself, it was I who was being reckless…”

“Hey, I would… I would say we were being… mutually irresponsible,” Duck said with a sly grin, “Anyway, I believe that answers your question…”

“It… absolutely does not,” Aubrey argued, with a wave of her drink. 

“Well, you see, I had Duck pinned to the wall, and then with my other hand I was-” Just as she began to form some questionable gestures Duck objected and placed his hands over hers.

“Okay!” he laughed nervously, “Okay, Minnie, remember how we talked about keeping some things to ourselves?”  
“We must win the game, Duck Newton, and to do this we must answer Aubrey Little’s question to her satisfaction! Do you wish to lose?”  
“I think we can take the loss, thank you, honey,” he said with a loving pat on her shoulder. Minerva, still looking slightly confused, seemed to move on.

Aubrey held out a hand to her, struggling to speak through her laughter, “You’re still winning, Minerva, it’s fine, that… definitely answers my question.”

“The endorphins increased my strength!” Minerva added, and Duck shook his head and laughed. Aubrey, eager to move on, nodded at Duck.

“Alright, Duck, that means it’s your turn.”

“Hm. My turn, huh?” Duck asked. He looked thoughtfully around the room, when a question occurred to him that wasn’t as light and funny as questions that had been asked before (most of which, up until now, had involved old past drama and sexual information). But he was allowed to ask anything and they had to answer, and he’d been thinking about this for a while, so why not now? He looked at Indrid, who had been quietly enjoying the company around him without contributing to the conversation. Upon being looked at Indrid looked slightly startled from his position touching no one on the couch, sitting with his arms close to his sides. “Indrid,” Duck began, “Why did you stay on Earth? You had a position on the Court of Silvane, and it seems like Earth’s been nothing but a struggle to you. Why stay here?” 

The tone of the game quickly shifted, though not in a way that was explicitly negative. People changed as Duck did, from giggly to genuinely curious, as one by one they all realized that it was something of an odd choice to make. Eyebrows creased and eyes were locked in Indrid, who, looking around at the group, swallowed. There was a drink in his hand and he looked down at it, as if considering downing it and opting out. But in the end, he spoke. “I did try to go back to the Court,” he admitted, “When Thacker first got the door back open, I took up my position at once. I just… couldn’t seem to stay.”

“Why not?” Duck went on.

Indrid sighed. “In order for me to answer this it would be better to explain a number of things. If you would like the short answer, it is that Earth was different from any place I’d ever lived, and that on Earth, even having to hide from the human gaze every moment, I was more comfortable than I had ever been. The long answer will take me approximately twenty seven minutes, and I’m not sure that you want to waste that much of this little game on me, so perhaps we should leave it at that,” he offered, and sipped his drink. Immediately the group met him with objections.

“Well, come on, you can’t just leave us with that!” Barclay insisted gently, “Hey, now that it’s brought up, you don’t live in Amnesty, either, never have.” He glanced at Mama, who nodded.

“That is true,” she said, “It seems everybody’s wondering about your motives, Mr. Cold.” With a look around the group she leaned forward, her voice automatically silencing everyone else’s. “I think we’ve learned enough about our friends’ preferred forms of intercourse for one night,” she said with a chuckle, “Twenty seven minutes of an interesting story sounds mighty fine to me, if you’d like to tell it.”  
She looked at Indrid, who considered this. He then smiled very wide. “You say that like, at this point, I have a choice.”

Mama grinned back. “You’ve got a point there.”

After a moment, Indrid sighed. “Oh, alright. I suppose it would be alright to let you into my motivations for a while. I do not often tell this story, so forgive me if I get ahead of myself…”

I should begin by explaining to the dear humans in our company that foresight is not a common Sylvanian trait. I understand now that I have spoken to several humans that it is often attributed to my race, when in fact, the frequency at which truly psychic people appear on Silvane is approximately the same as it is on Earth, which is why I was made into the Court Seer at a very young age. I believe I was sixteen or so at the time I had my first vision, which, interestingly enough, was the day before Silvane was shattered and lost. I saw her being taken, and a deep red storm I now know to be the Quell. But you must understand - this was unheard of at the time. 

I had told my father about my disturbing dream, as I thought it was, and they knew it to be true a few days later, when it was announced that Silvaine was lost. After a while I began to attract attention - after all, the visions became more frequent and they were more often true than not, and by the time I accurately predicted the Quell’s first strike there was no debate - I was to be a military asset, and at just barely eighteen years old. 

I should specify that I am not  _ from  _ Silvane - the planet, yes, but not the city. This may be difficult for the dear humans in our company to imagine but there was a time, long before they knew, that our world was as rich and wide a world as yours, with billions of cities and towns. I was from a very small town called Merian, a place that was deep into the warm part of the Southern Continent where no one was ever really noticed. We had just barely discovered electricity down there, so suffice to say, it was an odd transition, being brought to Silvane and placed on the court. I could not believe what was before me - even back then, Silvane was as rich and as beautiful as all of you know it to be - perhaps there are a few here who recall. Barclay, I have not asked about your age but I’m sure you know that that city has a history of beauty and that, if one could believe it, its state as the humans would have seen it was what it looked like when in disarray.

However, as I got there, I found I was quite out of my depth. As soon as it was revealed that I was more than a simple country farmer everybody wanted something of me, and every day different military and political leaders began to demand that I tell them the future. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I would try to tell them. ‘It comes when it comes’. They did not listen to me. Just as I worried that they would consider me a fraud again came my first victory - accurately predicting the date and time of the destruction of a town called Renthau, one of the Quell’s first significant targets. Hundreds of lives were lost, but had they not evacuated, it would have been thousands.

At twenty I was formally placed on the Court. Perhaps this is old to humans, but on Silvane, I was a child, and nothing more than that. It is strange, you know, back in Merian manners were a confusing, pretentious thing for the more grandiose of cities. If you wanted food or water, you simply asked. Visits were quick, and common, and all you had to do was knock on someone’s door, dressed in common clothes and vigorously shake their hand. My people were vulgar, but loving. For this reason I will admit that living on the Court of Silvane was… difficult. I was made to wear the more… formal dress, of course, and taught how to adequately behave. Most couldn’t stand me. Janelle, Woodbridge, they both thought that I was nothing more than a foolish child. Looking back, I’m sure they resented me, since I had powers and they didn’t. It was a sort of Mozart and Solieri situation, to use a human metaphor, only I was the only Mozart and Solieri was, essentially, the entire Court. I was… not appreciated. 

Of course, as all this went on, I began to consider my visions somewhat disheartening. They were very vague back then, and not nearly as local as they were once I got to Earth. I pretty much only saw the Quell and the destruction it caused, which could rarely be stopped by our insufficient military sources. Night after night I would wake with terrible visions of dark creatures and people screaming, just to be awoken by another military general awaiting an update. My only saving grace was Vincent, who was actually patient with me - I believe all of you know him. He was a good deal older than me, an adult and a bold general by the time I got in. He, too, found me rather annoying, but I believe he sympathized with me. He would always make deals with me to get me to behave. 

“Just get through this one meeting, Indrid, I know how boring it is,” he would say to me, “If you make them think you’re interested we can go out for candy afterward.” He would always follow through, too. He was a very good man to me. In case I haven’t verbalized it, Aubrey Little and Duck Newton, my greatest appreciation for keeping him alive. 

This went on for quite some time. Eventually I abandoned feeling rebellious and youthful and sank into my role as Court Seer. I would spend all my days indoors, deep in a trance and scribbling on sheets of paper. I became accustomed to the dramatic, fluffed up robes and capes, the impossibly boring meetings, the questions from generals and politicians. WIthin about a hundred years my visions had gotten tremendously precise. One would think that this was a good thing, yes? It was, in ways, I suppose. It didn’t seem like it at the time. What was once a vague impression of destruction and fear was now the blood splattering onto my face, the hoarseness of a screaming throat, the aching of black smoke in my lungs. For me, that was a difficult time, especially since the military was growing weaker, and we were running out of places to evacuate to. My visions were to the minute and they were doing nothing. I saw each attack as it would happen perfectly, but I had no means to stop it. After a while, it became difficult to stop thinking about it at any part of the day. It is easy to think in the abstract: people are dying. A town is burning. It is different to know that, this very moment, a woman named Carla Serette is being thrown down into the mud by a blood red horse made up of smoke, the neck of the baby in her arms immediately breaking at the impact of it. 

But at least there was still Vincent. He was the only one who didn’t have to knock on the door to my room. I always hated that place. Covered in long stained glass and filled up with fancy throw pillows and bits of paper, graphite along the bases of all the beautifully ornate wall decorations. He would always take me somewhere else, the gardens outside, for instance. Soon enough, he was not so liked by the Court of Silvane either, seeing how he was the one always standing up for a bratty Southern child. I remember once he got into a confrontation with Woodbridge about it. 

“Why wasn’t he in his room?” Woodbridge asked, “The general was looking for him, we need this information.”   


“He’s done enough for today, I took him out for a break.”   


“A break?!” he’d shouted, “Vincent, if that boy takes a break, the entire Eastern continent could fall! Don’t you think there are more important things at stake here?”  
But Vincent insisted. “Woodbridge, he is still a person, and I will not have you working him to death! No matter the cost!” 

There was a night, around that time, that I had a tremendously precise vision of someone in Silvane. It was a woman, I don’t know her name, and I saw that in one very unlikely future she would decide to take the bus instead of a cab that day, and on that bus would be a lover she had thought to have been dead for fifteen years. At this point, the Quell had overtaken more than half of Silvane, and this was the first good vision I had had in weeks. In this vision the woman, a brown-haired, spectral form, would immediately burst into tears, covering her mouth and tackling the other woman with a hug. The other woman, who had the face of a cat and thick orange fur, would just stare and cry out her name, and then she would be crying too. They would stay like that for some time, rocking in each other’s arms, and then they would both disregard their previous responsibilities to talk for hours. I had never seen anything so lovely. Immediately I rushed to the phone and called the number of the brunette woman, which came to me with perfect clarity. I told her, “My name is Indrid Cold, and I am the Court Seer. You  _ must  _ take the bus today instead of the taxi! Something truly wonderful will happen, I assure you!”

As far as I know, she did it. However, late that night, the rest of the Court had come into my room as Woodbridge gave me a thirty minute lecture on how what I did was simply intolerable, as Vincent just stood there, listening to him go on. I was confined to my room for the rest of the day, and I wasn’t allowed to use the phone any longer. 


End file.
